I’ve been attending conference for most of my working life and I’ve found that it’s a real skill to get the most out of an event like NamesCon. Although everyone will have their own style I thought that I’d share how I prepare and approach a major industry conference.

For a start, flying from Australia to Las Vegas isn’t cheap and combined with the jetlag at either end it’s really is a 10-day venture. To get a return on the investment of the direct costs and for my time I’ll want to make sure that I manage my time very carefully.

Before scheduling meetings, check the agenda. Nine times out of ten there will be a number of sessions that I will like to attend. Block these times out or you’ll find you can miss some great input that could potentially transform your business.

For the past five weeks Roselyn and I have been traveling all over Europe. It’s been fantastic to experience different cultures, food and a lot of adventures but now I’m focused on ICANN in Abu Dhabi.

I’m writing this from the Rome airport where we’re catching an Emirates flight through to Dubai. Once landed, a car will take us to Abu Dhabi and the conference.....so please bear with the brevity of the article.

For those of you that have never been to an ICANN conference they are something to experience. As well as the normal policy work a huge amount of business is conducted in a very short space of time. You literally have thousands of representatives from registries, registrars, hosting companies and ancillary businesses in the same room….so a lot gets done.

What can be a little intimidating for first time attendees is the fact that everyone seems to know everyone else. This shouldn’t be a surprise as many of the attendees have spent the last twenty plus years charting the course of the Internet together. Despite this, what I’ve found is the great majority are really wonderful people trying to do the best for the businesses and organisations they represent.

I’ve found that each ICANN related conference has been very worthwhile attending as they have given me a much wider appreciation for all the stakeholders in the domain community. Sometimes, as domain investors, we can become quite myopic in our thinking about what is and isn’t important.

Some people complain about ICANN taking a long, long time to make decisions. I personally like this as I know nothing is going to leap out of a dark corner and sideline my business. If ICANN does anything on the policy front that impacts my investments, then I’ll know about it for literally years before it’s finally put into practice.

If you’re attending ICANN then don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I’d love to catch-up for a drink or two….in the meantime, I’d better go and catch that flight!

Cheers!

The first two articles in this series discussed the different aspects of the exciting new ParkLogic Next platform. Below is a video that demonstrates a number of the features of Next in the client interface.

Don't forget to catch-up with a ParkLogic representative at the Merge conference in Orlando over the next few days. I'm sure they will be happy to answer any additional questions you may have.

Part 1 in the series on the new ParkLogic Next platform covered a number of the innovations that have been built into the new platform. In this article, I'm highlighting some of the new features in the client interface that greatly assist in managing a domain portfolio.

On top of the revolutionized backend the ParkLogic team have poured a huge amount of effort into providing a client interface that is full of invaluable easily accessible information. The ultimate goal is to make downloading statistics into Excel a thing of the past. Right in the interface, clients can sort, filter and manipulate their domain traffic data…..but of course, CSV files will always be available.

The dashboard provides a slider for expanded viewing of date ranges and you can even drop trend lines right on a chart. At a click of a button, any data in a graph can be instantly displayed in the table below. It’s all about making the data both accessible and actionable.

It’s not often that I directly highlight what my own company, ParkLogic, has been working on to better monetise domain traffic. This time I’m going to make an exception. We’re really excited to announce that several weeks ago we completed the migration of the last of the ParkLogic clients onto our new Next platform.

Around 3 years ago, based upon all the knowledge we’d gained monetising domain traffic over the previous 8 years we made the decision to completely redevelop the ParkLogic platform from the ground up. At the time we had huge aspirations about the development being a 12 month project but like many things involving technology it took a little bit longer…..like just over 18 months longer. This was largely the result of an unending stream of awesome ideas!